Messina Putting Obama Campaign Forces to Work in States

President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign -- a political powerhouse with 20 million e-mail addresses and 4 million volunteers -- is setting its sights on state-level battles such as gay marriage legislation in Illinois.

Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager and chairman of its successor, a nonprofit called Organizing for Action, said today at a Bloomberg Government lunch that the three-month-old national group will take its case for the president’s legislative agenda out of Washington.